OpenAI currently uses a combination of automation and human review to handle potentially harmful incidents. Certain conversational triggers alert the company’s system to suicidal ideations, which then relay the information to a human safety team. The company claims that every time it receives this kind of notification, the incident is reviewed by a human. “We strive to review these safety notifications in under one hour,” the company says.

If OpenAI’s internal team decides that the situation represents a serious safety risk, ChatGPT proceeds to send the trusted contact an alert — either by email, text message, or an in-app notification. The alert is designed to be brief and to encourage the contact to check in with the person in question. It does not include detailed information about what was being discussed, as a means of protecting the user’s privacy, the company says.

The Trusted Contact feature follows the safeguards the company introduced last September that gave parents the power to have some oversight of their teens’ accounts, including receiving safety notifications designed to alert the parent if OpenAI’s system believes their child is facing a “serious safety risk.” For some time now, ChatGPT has also included automated alerts to seek professional health services, should a conversation trend toward the topic of self-harm.

Crucially, Trust Contact is optional and, even if the protection is activated on a particular account, any user can have multiple ChatGPT accounts. OpenAI’s parental controls are also optional, presenting a similar limitation.